Hahahahaha.

From BBC News. (via MrBrown)

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful – and so are we,” the US president told a high-level meeting of Pentagon officials. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.”

It is 2am in the morning. My jetlag finally hit me … I got knockout at 2pm and slept all the way until now. *sigh* Now I am wide awake and what should I do? :P

Let see, I could play with my new iPod ;-) I went to the Apple store today with Andrew and he convince me to buy one. (I think it is to reduce his guilt that he is buying one himself :P) I decided to go with it because iPod just come out with a new version. But I prefer the old one, which is cooler with its lit-up button and zero movable-part. And I better buy it before they ran out of stock :-)

I love how well iPod integrates with my powerbook! Just plugin and it just works. Beautiful and this is how software should be!

Actually I wasn’t at IETF. Instead, I went out to visit Lindows (aka Linspire) and SIPPhone.com who is based in UTC in San Diego. I met Michael Robertson about a couple of months ago in Singapore and this is basically a courtesy call to catch up on things. Michael is not in town unfortunately, but I met up with Jeff Bonforte and Randy Linnel (sipphone & linspire respectively) and spend the whole morning with them. It is worthy to note that how 6-man company can change the world :-)

We are suppose to have an APEET dinner tonight but most members weren’t here. But we went out to dinner nevertheless, with Hotta-san, Yoneya-san, Morishita-san, Fujiwara-san, Jim Reid and Carsten Schiefner. We have Sushi and end up discussing ENUM anyway. ENUM is well, ENUM but Sushi was funny, esp when Jim yelled ‘Gozilla!’. ;-)

Carrier ENUM is a disaster! Basically, I screwed up big time and failed to managed the time. Or perhaps I was stumbling (I notice I do that when I dont get enough sleep). Either way, what happened is that while we still taking strawpolls of requirements, before discussing next step, half of room suddenly stand up and walk out, hurrying to get to their muffins and coffee.

Looking back, it is pretty funny and I am taking this with a smile. ;-) For one, we achieve at least half the goals, in the sense that we know there are a bunch of people really interested in Carrier ENUM, and the other half don’t. And more importantly, we got some consensus on requirements and none on others. The interesting portions are those which we have no consensus because it goes to show how differ we are in what we think it is …

ps: Oh yea, Meng Wong took pity with my powerbrick and gave me his extra Apple adaptor for US. Thanks! :-)

I found out I left my power adaptor in the airport lounge in LAX and now stuck here with a risk of power shortage :P Luckily, Andrew was kind enough to visit Frys¹ with me yesterday and I got a new power adaptor. The bad news is the Frys only have this ridiculous looking adaptor and it looks really dumb! :P

Anyway, I attended the Application Area meeting. Tim Bray gave an update of ATOM and what it aims to achieve and I just subscribe to the mailing list. I might just work on ATOM support in D4B but Tim asked me to hold back for a few more months as the specs is under going a major change.

The other thing thing that interest me is MARID. Marshall Rose gave an presentation on SenderID and he is pretty confident he can wrap things up in August. That’s a very good news :-)

¹ I remember I bought my first digital camera from this Frys in 2000. I was here with Maynard and we were arguing who gets the last digital camera they have left :-)

I am now at Sheraton in San Diego. The last time I was here is in 2000 for IETF #49. Nothing seem to change much but it appears almost everyone who is vacating in US is here in San Diego. I almost couldn’t get a hotel at all and have to stay at the Hilton 10mins from Sheraton.

I was lucky (or maybe it is due to my Silver Honor Hilton), I was given one of the best view in the hotel, top floor facing the sea from the open window. I think I am going to enjoy having breakfast from my balcony :-)

Oh yea, finally meet Henry Sinnreich. We have dinner tonight together with Richard^2 (Shockey and Stastny) and Wilriech (sp?) from Siemen and Andrew Leung (yea, was quite surprise to see him here). We have an interesting dinner discussion on SIP and ENUM, one that changed my perspective (again) of how the industry would be developing…

FCC conducted a Global Roundtable discussion on IP-based services (basically just VoIP) 2 days ago (30th July) and the webcast is available online. (via Jeff Pulver).

Yes, I sit infront of the computer for 2 hours and listen the whole webcast and here are some of my thoughts:

1. (Obvious) Take away: Regulation certainity is important for industry to invest billions/trillions to upgrade their infrastructure.

2. Jeff took the opportunity to bash some bad policies. :-) Well done! We need someone to say outloud the most obvious especially when there are lobbies on the other side.

3. The open-access issues raised by Tom Vest is a potential future problem. At this moment, we are aware of ISPs doing it, either block or ban the services outright or muffling the packets sufficient to make the quality very poor. But it is too early to say if regulators should step in on this ‘market-failure’ because (1) the outrage isn’t very big yet and (2) the industry haven’t got a chance at self-regulation yet. Given a choice, I prefer industry self-regulation.

4. Alcatel made their usual speech Internet Protocol is good but “Wild Wild West” Internet is bad. (Yes, my jaw dropped too when I first saw their ITU-NGN slides). Here is a clue: NGN wont be a brand-new network¹. IPv6 couldn’t move people to move to a new network and “Quality” & “Security” arent disruptive enough for people to build a new one. Sorry, any network that doesn’t connect to the current “Wild Wild West” isn’t going to fly.

¹ This is not to say I dont think the future wont have a new network. On the controdictory, I believe we will have a new network in future, within my lifetime. But it will be some radically different offering something the current Internet couldnt provide. It is probably hard to imaging why, how and what it is going to be like right now as it is difficult to imaging Internet in the 1970s.

This is the first time I took the 16th non-stop long haul Singapore-Los Angeles SQ20 flight. The plane is full but I dont feel cramped at all given the space they gave to each passenger. The Executive Economy seat (all travels are at economy now :p) is almost as good as the old Raffles Class.

This is a classic Value Innovation at work. While most airline would go for packing more seats and cut back on services to increase profit margin, Singapore Air took another path to go for bigger space and better services at slightly more expensive fees. It is pretty simple logic: 130seats but at 90% load is better then 200 seats at 40% load. Considering it is a 16hrs flight, I dont mind paying a bit more for increase legspace!

Gosh, I love this flight!